EREVAN, Armenia (AP) – Thousands of opposition supporters on Tuesday blocked the construction of the Armenian parliament to strain the resignation of the country’s minister.
Nikol Pashinyan rejected opposition tension to resign following a November peace agreement ending six weeks of heavy attacks in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, in which Azerbaijan defeated Armenian forces.
Political tensions escalated last month when the Army General Staff demanded Pashinyan’s resignation, and he responded by firing the Chief of the General Staff, Colonel General Onik Gasparyan.
On Tuesday, the opposition tried to pressure Pashinyan by urging his supporters to block parliament. Thousands of opposition protesters surrounded the construction of the parliament and fought with the police.
Vazgen Manukyan, an experienced politician whom the opposition has appointed as acting long-term prime minister, predicted that the army would not settle for Pashinyan’s order to dismiss the leader of the general staff.
“The army doesn’t back off because it’s not just a men’s problem,” he said.
Based on his maneuvers to defuse the political crisis, Pashinyan proposed an early parliamentary vote later this year, but rejected the opposition’s request to withdraw before the vote.
Artur Vanetsyan, the former head of the national security service headed by the opposition Homeland Party, presses that “elections deserve not to be held under Nikol Pashinyan’s regime. “
Pashinyan has faced demands for resignation from the opposition since 10 November, when a peace agreement negotiated by Russia ended 44 days of intense fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, which left more than 6,000 more dead. Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding spaces that had been maintained through Armenian forces for more than a quarter of a century.
Pashinyan, a 45-year-old former journalist who came to the force after leading giant street protests in 2018 that overthrew his predecessor, defined the peace agreement as the only way to prevent the Azerbaijani army from invading the entire Nagorno-Karabakh region. which is located in Azerbaijan but has been under the control of Armenian ethnic forces subsidized through Armenia since the end of a separatist war in 1994.
Russia has deployed about 2,000 peacekeepers in the peace agreement.
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Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.